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Primary Documents - Lenin's Call to Power, 24 October 1917

Having received news that
the Russia's Provisional Government was about to raise the bridges spanning
the Nava, Lenin hastily wrote, on 24 October 1917, his famous 'Call to
Power' to the Soviet Central Committee. In it he urged that power be
quickly seized from
Alexander
Kerenski's Provisional Government.

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His plan for an armed
uprising was placed into action on the night of 24-25 October in Petrograd.
Kerenski's government was overthrown and Kerenski himself forced to flee the
country in exile (thereafter spending much of the remainder of his long life
in the U.S.).

Call to Power

I am writing these lines on
the evening of the 24th. The situation is critical in the extreme.
In fact it is now absolutely clear that to delay the uprising would be
fatal.

With all my might I urge
comrades to realize that everything now hangs by a thread; that we are
confronted by problems which are not to be solved by conferences or
congresses (even congresses of Soviets), but exclusively by peoples, by the
masses, by the struggle of the armed people.

The bourgeois onslaught of
the Kornilovites show that we must not wait. We must at all costs,
this very evening, this very night, arrest the government, having first
disarmed the officer cadets, and so on.

We must not wait! We
may lose everything!

Who must take power?

That is not important at
present. Let the Revolutionary Military Committee do it, or "some
other institution" which will declare that it will relinquish power only to
the true representatives of the interests of the people, the interests of
the army, the interests of the peasants, the interests of the starving.

All districts, all
regiments, all forces must be mobilized at once and must immediately send
their delegations to the Revolutionary Military Committee and to the Central
Committee of the Bolsheviks with the insistent demand that under no
circumstances should power be left in the hands of Kerensky and Co.... not
under any circumstances; the matter must be decided without fail this very
evening, or this very night.

History will not forgive
revolutionaries for procrastinating when they could be victorious today (and
they certainly will be victorious today), while they risk losing much
tomorrow, in fact, the risk losing everything.

If we seize power today, we
seize it not in opposition to the Soviets but on their behalf.

The seizure of power is the
business of the uprising; its political purpose will become clear after the
seizure....

...It would be an infinite
crime on the part of the revolutionaries were they to let the chance slip,
knowing that the salvation of the revolution, the offer of peace, the
salvation of Petrograd, salvation from famine, the transfer of the land to
the peasants depend upon them.

The government is
tottering. It must be given the death-blow at all costs.